A cleanup at a homeless camp off Revere Avenue near the interchange with the Bend Parkway has drawn ire from some activists.
On Thursday morning, workers with the Oregon Department of Transportation and Bend Police Department brought in equipment to clean up an area of roughly half a dozen camps. The notice for the cleanup was posted Feb. 25, said Peter Murphy, a spokesperson for ODOT.
Murphy said initially the agency posted only one eviction notice for one particular camp that was not keeping the area clean. But later in the day, the ODOT District 10 manager decided to negotiate with the camper, who will now be allowed to stay.
“We are sufficiently apprised of her desire to abide by our rules. She met the threshold to stay,” Murphy said.
When asked what changed ODOT’s position, Murphy said he doesn’t know exactly what was said, but that ODOT is “a cooperative agency trying to find way to say yes, generally.”
Murphy said ODOT workers were working with the homeless campers to separate out what is trash and what is personal property. Personal property, according to state statute, must be kept in storage for at 30 days to give people the ability to retrieve it.
But a small group of activists with the Central Oregon Peacekeepers, who were livestreaming the cleanup, felt that homeless campers were not being treated fairly, and having more than just trash being thrown away by the agency.
Luke Richter, the leader of the peacekeepers, said he was concerned about whether the campers were getting enough resources about where to find their personal property.
The organization has regularly been livestreaming homeless camp cleanups or evictions around the city, arguing it is inhumane to do so when the public health guidelines say camps should not be moved amid a pandemic.
Mike Eaton, who lives on ODOT property on the other side of the highway on Revere Avenue, watched from the sidewalk as ODOT equipment went through the camp where many of his friends live.
Eaton personally spent all day cleaning up his campsite in preparation for ODOT to come through, he said. But tearing down a home and rebuilding it constantly can be hard.
”It’s like building with straw,” he said. “There’s not a lot of alternatives.”